2018.06.26 14:52

Yesterday I wrote a tiny JSON encoder/decoder in Erlang. While the Erlang community wasn’t in dire need of yet another JSON parser, the ones I saw around do things just a tiny bit differently than I want them to and writing a module against RFC-8259 isn’t particularly hard or time consuming.

Someone commented on (gasp!) the lack of tests in that module. They were right. I just needed the module to do two things, the code is boring, and I didn’t write tests. I’m such a rebel! Or a villain! Or… perhaps I’m just someone who values my time.

Maybe you’re thinking I’m one of those coding cowboys who goes hog wild on unsafe code! No. I’m not. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I have learned over the last 30 years of fiddling about with software is that hand-written tests are mostly a waste of time.

Here’s what happens:

You write a new thingy.

You throw all the common cases at it in the shell. It seems to work. Great!

Being a prudent coder you basically translate the things you thought to throw at it in the shell into tests.

You hook it up to an actual project you’re using somewhere — and it breaks!

You fix the broken bits, and maybe add a test for whatever you fixed.

Then other people start using it in their projects and stuff breaks quite a lot more ZOMG AHHH!

Where in here did your hand-written tests help out? If you write tests to define the bounds of the problem before you actually wrote your functions then tests might help out quite a lot because they deepen your understanding of the problem before you really tackle it head-on. Writing tests before code isn’t particularly helpful if you already thoroughly understand the problem and just need something to work, though.

When I wrote ZJ yesterday I needed it to work in the cases that I care about — and it did, right away. So I was happy. This morning, however, someone else decided to drop ZJ into their project and give it a go — and immediately ran into a problem! ZJ v0.1.0 returns an error if it finds trailing commas in JSON arrays or objects! Oh noes!

Wait… trailing commas aren’t legal in JSON. So what’s the deal? Would tests have discovered this problem? Of course not, because hand-written tests would have been bounded by the limits of my imagination and my imagination was hijacked by an RFC all day yesterday. But the real world isn’t an RFC, and if you’ve ever dealt with JSON in the wild that you’re not generating you’ll know that all sorts of heinous and malformed crap is clogging the intertubes, and most of it sports trailing commas.

My point here isn’t that testing is bad or always a waste of time, my point is that hand-written tests are themselves prone to the exact same problems the code being tested is: you wrote them so they carry flaws of implementation, design and scope, just like the rest of your project.

“So when is testing good?” you might ask. As mentioned earlier, those cases where you are trying to model the problem in your mind for the first time, before you’ve written any handling code, is a great time to write tests for no other reason than they help you understand the problem. But that’s about as far as I go with hand-writing tests.

The three types of testing I like are:

type checks

machine generated (property testing)

real-world (user testing)

A good type checker like Dialyzer (or especially ghc’s type system, but that’s Haskell) can tell you a lot about your code in very short order. It isn’t unusual at all to have sections of code that are written to do things that are literally impossible, but you wouldn’t know about until much later because, due simply to lack of imagination, quite often hand-written tests would never have executed the code, or not in a way that would reveal the structural error.Typespecs: USE THEM

Good property testing systems like PropEr and QuickCheck generate and run as many tests as you give them time to (really, it is just constrained by time and computing resources), and once they discover breakages can actually fuzz the problem out to pinpoint the exact failing cases and very often indicate the root cause pretty quickly. It is amazing. If you ever experience this you’ll never want to hand write tests again.Property Testing: USE IT

What about user testing? It is simply necessary. You’ll never dream up the insane stuff to try that users will, and neither will a property-based test generation system. Your test and development environment will often bear little resemblance to your users’ environments (a few weirdos out there still use Windows!), the things you might think to store in your system will rarely look anything like the sort of stuff they will wind up storing in it (you were thinking text, they were thinking video), and the frequency of operation that you assumed might look realistic will almost never been anywhere close to the mark (your one-off utility program that you assumed would run in isolation initiated by a user command in ~/bin/ may become the core part of a massively parallelized service script executed every minute by a cron job running as root).Your Users: COMMUNICATE WITH THEM

Ultimately, hand-written tests tend to reveal a lot more about the author of the tests than the status of the software being tested.

2018.05.30 01:00

I finally got a few days to really dedicate to the whole Zomp/ZX thing and wrote some docs.

If you actually click this link soon you’ll see an incomplete pile of poo, but it is a firm enough batch of poo that I can show it now, and you can get a very basic idea what this system is supposed to do:

Some pages are missing and things are still a bit self-conflicted. The problem is that until you really use a system like this a bit it is hard to know what the actual requirements need to be. So that’s been a long internal journey.

If my luck holds I’ll have something useful out in short order, though. Here’s to keeping fingers crossed and creating useful on-ramps for new programmers in desperate need of easy-to-use power tools. While we can all only hope the gods will help them when it comes to tackling their actual human-relevant problems, the environment in which they render their solutions should not be actively hostile.

2014.03.3 12:24

From time to time I encounter openly discoverable code that is so wild in nature that I can’t help but wonder if the author was writing a machine function or a satirical statement.

Groovy source: ArrayUtil.java

After spending a few days plowing through Java code at the outset of a new Android project I found myself checking around for practical alternatives. In the course of that search (which netted Scala, Groovy and Clojure, in descending order of easy tooling for Android) I stumbled across this gem of a source file in the Groovy codebase. At first I couldn’t really tell if this was a joke about Java’s expressiveness or a functioning bit of code, but then I realized it is actually both — all the more funny because its expressing a cumbersome optimization that will execute on the same JVM either way:

Breach: A browser as practical satire

Someone from the Erlang world was kind enough to paste a link to Breach — a browser written in node.js. Its so full of meta fail and manifests the very essence of hipster circular logic that… I can only assume it is satire in the same vein as INTERCAL.

IBM SDK for Node.js on System Z

The going question at IBM has, for the last few decades at least, not been “Is it a good idea?” but “Are people deluded enough to pay for this?” This stands in heavy contrast to the countless bouts of genius that have peppered their research and development over the last century.

But IBM is a business, after all, and we’ve all got to eat. IBM was late recognizing that the majority of programmers and other IT professionals had left the world of engineering behind for the greener pastures of pop culture and fansterish tech propaganda, and to play catch up IBM had to innovate. Actually, this is a sort of business genius: IBM realized that tech doesn’t sell as well as bullshit and buzz when it watched Motorola get steamrolled by Intel’s marketing efforts around the original 286.

IBM has gone one further. I think this must have started as a practical joke at IBM, and then someone realized “Wait! Holy shit! This could be the hipster coup of the century and get us back in the web game!” Har har har. Joke’s on… all of us.

“Process scope variables” in Erlang

I couldn’t have written a more concise satire-by-demonstration on what sucks about bringing the Java-style OOP thinking process as mental/emotional baggage when one starts using Erlang than this short message that appeared on the Erlang-Questions mailing list one day:

> So much time spent for removing one State variable from a few function calls.
much more time will be saved when refactoring from now on.
imagine:
most funs will now have signature:
-spec a(pid()) -> ok.
and most function bodies will look like:
check(Pid),
update(Pid),
return(Pid).
it will be a breeze now.